Those two most notorious rakes and lovers, the fictional Don Giovanni and the
electrifyingly historical Giacomo Casanova, are easy to confuse. With good
reason: as the author of this lively new biography observes, Casanova
actually had a box at the premiere of Mozart's opera, in 1787, and he may
even have helped write the libretto.
Casanova recorded sexual skirmishes with some 130 women, and “a handful, as it
were”, as Kelly puts it, of men. Among the women were novices and nuns,
mothers, sisters and daughters (including his own), matriarchs and ingenues,
aristocrats and prostitutes, women dressed as soldiers and women
masquerading as operatic castrati. Among the men were a handsome young
seminarian for whose sake Casanova got kicked out of the seminary, and a
Turkish man of letters with whom Casanova charmingly confessed he “had to
submit to his taking turnabout. It would have been impolite to refuse”.
Don Giovanni, of course, catalogued 1,003 conquests in Spain alone. But if
Casanova can't compete on numbers, his life was easily as colourful as that
of his fictional counterpart. His witty ripostes, his duels, his dialogues
with philosophers and queens and, above all, his daring escape from prison
in Venice (he peeled back the roof leads, climbed into the Doge's palace,
summoned a watchman to open the gate, walked across the Piazzetta and took a
gondola to freedom) were the very stuff of society gossip.
In Ian Kelly's hands, the story makes for a thrilling read - and is somewhat
more manageable than the 4,000 folio pages of Casanova's original memoirs.
Kelly's subtitle is Actor, Spy, Lover, Priest, but he is no more interested
in religion or diplomacy than was his subject. The young Venetian saw the
church as a vaulting-horse for his ambition and a passport to travel, but
church and Casanova soon realised they weren't suited. As for spying, we
hear only rumblings of the era's political rivalries, and Casanova's
man-on-the-make role in them.
The love affairs, rather than politics, are Kelly's consuming interest. Few
have loved as widely, or written about it as vividly and honestly, as
Casanova. Kelly, oddly, is a little more circumspect. He recounts Casanova's
first sexual experience (in bed, in 1741, with two sisters) in full, but
otherwise avoids pornographic detail.
When Casanova meets Anna Maria d'Antoni Vallati in the gorgeously classical
gardens of the Villa Aldobrandini, Kelly tells us how statues of “naked gods
and monsters grappled with mountain streams and each other”, but doesn't
indulge overmuch in the real-life grappling. “We unlaced, we unbuttoned, our
hearts throbbed, our hands hurried to calm their impatience,” Kelly quotes -
and that's about it. When, many years later, Casanova makes love to his own
adult daughter by that same Anna Maria, the page is alive with blushing
triplets of full stops.
Kelly is an actor as well as a biographer, and he plays up Casanova the
self-dramatist. (He even divides his book into acts and scenes rather than
chapters, with intermezzi covering key themes. It's cleverly done, but maybe
labours the point.) Casanova was both an actress's son and a Venetian, a
habitual masquerader from what was then the most theatrical city in Europe.
He spent much of his career pursuing - or, on occasion, fleeing -
actress-prostitutes across the Continent. “The thing,” he wrote, “is to
dazzle.”
Kelly evokes the 18th-century demi-monde captivatingly. It is a world of
condoms closed by ribbons in green or scarlet silk, oysters and Oeil de
Perdrix champagne, coffee and malvasia wine, and financial and sexual bills
of exchange. Kelly is less successful in getting to his subject's heart,
perhaps because Casanova really was the quintessential actor. His affairs
and intrigues seem to have motivations no deeper than to make himself
famous, rich and, above all, beloved. Casanova's candour and wit were
clearly beguiling. He was hard to resist but equally hard to fall in love
with - and remains so. Kelly does rescue Casanova's previous reputation as
an “erotic fantasist, con-artist and serial dissembler”, as he puts it, and
cross-references other sources to prove that he really didn't make it all
up. What Kelly can't do is make his hero seem any less of a chancer.
Casanova funded his louche lifestyle by gambling, living off his patrons and
conquests, and by launching France's first state lottery - a speculation
from which he made one of Europe's fastest fortunes. He lost it almost as
quickly. Casanova also made kabbalistic predictions for credulous
aristocrats, presenting himself as a Freemason-meets-sorcerer. Kelly
believes this brings “an unexpected spiritual dimension to this most fleshly
of men” but Casanova himself admitted how cynically he exploited his
clients.
When he attempted to impregnate the wealthy and aged Marquise d'Urfe (by
deflowering a virgin in her presence and ejaculating inside her three times,
stimulated by a naked gyrating dancer, who happened to be his mistress), his
esoteric justifications were as fake as his second and third orgasms. Even
when Casanova was compassionate he had an eye out for sexual opportunity. He
was asked to perform an abortion for a friend in need. To the alchemical
prescription of saffron and myrrh applied to the mouth of the womb, Casanova
added his own extra ingredient and method of delivery.
The sheer exuberance and excess of Casanova's life is at times overwhelming.
Chapters burst with the names of salons and theatres, cities and capitals,
lovers and rivals. Our hero has hardly extricated himself from one financial
embarrassment when he is implicated in an erotic one. His life reads like a
classic 18th-century novel. This is hardly surprising. Casanova may have
lived life as an actor, but he recounted it as a true writer.
Casanova's memoirs are the swan song of the libertine 18th century. He died in
June 1798, surrounded not by lovers but by books, and his own voluminous
memoirs. “He did not go down shouting his disdain for morality, like Don
Giovanni,” Kelly writes, “he went with a wry smile and a knowing joke as the
curtain fell.”
A year earlier, Napoleon had brought an end to the long debauch of the
Venetian republic and its even longer decline. The whole culture of
transcontinental philandering would soon die, too, in a welter of cannon
smoke and Romantic ideals. Europe was about to become what Casanova could
never manage to be: serious.
Casanova by Ian Kelly
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